Lost in Translation

In her book Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes a childhood game that encapsulates something about what is encrypted underneath the overt content of any translation. ‘I want to tell a story, every story, everything all at once’, she writes, ‘not anything in particular that might be said through the words I know, and I try to roll all sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables, as if they might make a Mobius strip of language in which everything, everything is contained’ (Hoffman, 1989: 11).

The inherent impossibility to contain it all within language, as so beautifully described by Eva Hoffman, became apparent to me during the last few years in which, after moving to England, the linguistic matrix of my life turned into a mosaic amalgamation of both Hebrew and English. Although born into a Hebrew-mother-tongue, in the last few years, personally and professionally, I drift in-between the two languages never to reach the safety of shore. In what way has my analytic work changed with this transition? I will explore in this paper my movements within the ‘Mobius strip of language’, to quote Eva Hoffman, during these last few years. I would like to ask: how did my continual movement between the two different languages alter my listening and my position as a therapist? In what way has the ongoing trans-passing between Hebrew and English shifted my relation to psychoanalysis, as a form of therapy that is committed to the ongoing translation of unconscious murmurs? Touching on different theoretical threads, and exploring linguistic echoes of various meanings in-between languages, I will attempt to give an account of the intricacies of this transition in my clinical work, this ongoing translation, that was revealed to be, paradoxically, both ungrounding and fruitful.

Before moving to England, I have studied psychoanalysis for many years in Hebrew, and occupied both the patient's couch and the therapist's chair for more than a decade. Although I felt confident in my work in

Hebrew, it seemed that transferring my analytic position to a different country and a new language was not a simple task as it first appeared to be. In my analysis in English for the first time, I realised that it was not just a different language that was spoken between us, but a whole unfamiliar encounter: the room was darker, my analysts' chair was much further away from me, her facial expressions often seemed unfamiliar and her responses to my speaking distant and foreign. I felt that my words were groundlessly floating in the room, without being collected. Will she ever be able to touch them? Will my words be held? Will I ever feel understood again?

At first – I can say on hindsight – I was determined to clearly narrate myself in English too, and for a long time, I was trying to use language to fill the empty space between us with more and more words. I was convinced that it was the mere practicalities of scenery and language that were different, surely it is not me that has changed, and thus perfect translation of my life was reachable, just at the tip of the tongue. Preoccupied with the intensities of transferring between countries, I began my journey with a promise for a reconciliation of meanings in translation; with an expectation for narrowing the gap between languages, and with the prospect of eventually acquiring a larger variety of possibilities – two languages – in which I can explore and share my experience.

In Pontalis' description of the relationship between language and melancholy, he writes that

Being born of loss language has nothing of its own, only an immense appetite! In order to remain alive, it must devour everything, until the last bone of every body: it has to become even more seductive than any sexual organ; more sentimental than tears; more convincing than a punch. Language bruises, excites, stunts. Holding everything and nothing it remains in an eternal oscillation between grandiose magic and essential emptiness; in a movement from manic victory to melancholy.

Revealing something about the melancholic roots of language, the beginning of this translation-movement carried a desperate, manic flavoured search for words. For a long time, I was riding the roller-coaster of language that cannot cease moving to encounter its own alienation. I was working hard to deny the loss that sits at the heart of this transition, to cover – rather than discover – the sense of being misunderstood.

When my analyst suggested that the haunted chase for words is a painful attempt to find a home in language, the stream of words has gone quiet, and it was the first time I felt it was possible for me to sit in silence. Gradually, the acrobatic dance between languages shifted to a painful sense of alienation and I became more familiar with both my homelessness and my longing to find a home. Homeless in both languages, I grew an awareness of my inability to articulate thoughts, feelings, images and experiences, I was slowly and painfully confronted with the boundaries of both my speech and my listening.

Testifying to this sense of ending, a gap that cannot be crossed, the Hebrew word for language, safa, also means a rim, an edge and a boundary. As Walter Benjamin sketches through the image of a broken vessel (in Jennings and Bullock, 1996), words created in the process of translation are not testifying for any origin but are, in fact, a broken conformation for its absence. What is uncovered in translation is that the point of origin of language, safa, is also a point of ending. Languages, like pieces of a broken vessel, are irreconcilable and can only meet at the point of their breaking. In my trans-passing between Hebrew and English I was learning about the saf in safa, the inherent rift of languages in translation.

Constantly decomposing, the Tower of Babel echoes another aspect of this innate rupture in translation. This fascinating image has been portrayed by many thinkers as carrying the navel, the psychic construct of any translation. In fact, Derrida has described the story of Babel in Genesis 11 as ‘the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation’ (Derrida, 2007: 191). The biblical story of Babel follows the flood – a traumatic memory that participated desire for a phallic building to erect from earth to heaven. While the painful memory of human extinction continues to

haunt the living, a longing for oneness emerges only to be destroyed – and scattered like the people of earth – in a deconstructing movement that turns the fantasy of origin into multiple languages.

Derrida points to the eruptive struggle at the core of this ongoing process of translation: the Godly act of deconstruction, the endless fall of the tower, and the scattering of the people. It is the impossibility of building the tower, the failure of complete unity between signifier and signified, word and its meaning, that creates the continual longing for bridging this unbreachable gap, yet, it is precisely the act of God that will forever un-ground any (Godly) position of origin. In personifying both the dream to finally have an origin – One origin. Singular. Identical with itself – and its collapse, God opens the multiplicity of languages in the ongoing process of translation.

Recognising these images at a point of encounter between translation and psychoanalysis, I grew aware of my own ruins, and began to understand this particular paradox as an eruptive struggle and (mis) communication inherent to psychoanalysis: Babel can be translated from Hebrew as Bilbul, con-fusion – the name, the word, language itself, is continually and dialectically shifting between the proper name of the highest Tower and the state of utter confusion. Inhabiting the paradox of translation, the analytic work entails a Mobius perpetual movement in which confusion arises from the very attempt to be-with-fusion, to be one, to be understood.

But it was not until I started to work privately in English in my own practice that the actual falling off the Tower of Babel has begun. Therapy as a ‘talking cure’ became haunted by my displaced relation to language. Beginning to work with the complexities of a foreign language, too often I could not recognise the web of meanings associated with words or phrases in the therapy room. I found myself ungrounded; knowing less, imagining more; continually transferring Hebrew to English and English to Hebrew in the enigmatic labyrinth of psychoanalysis, I was somehow less contained by the matrix of language itself. A few months after I opened my private practice in England, I was visited by a recurrent dream in which I meet with T, a patient in my consulting room, and in which,

although I am speaking in English, T responds in an unfamiliar language that I can't understand and that felt to be some sort of Russian. In my work with T, but also in my other encounters in the therapy room – as the dream shows – I felt to be homelessly drifting in between languages. Both in English and – surprisingly – in Hebrew, I was now an immigrant and a foreigner in the most profound way.

One of the first things that T has told me when coming to therapy was how difficult it has always been for her to speak. T's stories were often unclear and felt like an attempt to detach the words from their emotions. Her language felt empty and shallow and I experienced myself unable to be emotionally involved. I never experienced her sadness, her anger, her anxiety. Her words came out in short sentences as pieces of dried reality that were devoid of any musical dynamics. It was missing a rhythm and an emotional tone in a way that turned her speech into a monotonous utterance, often making me wonder about the semiotic aspect of her language.

According to Kristeva ‘[T]he drives that extract the body from its homogeneous shell and turn it into a space linked to the outside, they are the forces which mark out the chora in process’ (Kristeva, 1998: 143). Harnessing Plato's khôra – the archaic mobile and receptacle realm, she conceptualises the semiotic khôra, as the pre-verbal dimension of language, which – although lacking structure and meaning – is non the less necessary for the creative and infinite potential of its signifying capacity. Stemming from the relationship to the mother's body, this (pre)linguistic aspect of language contains the movements, the rhythms, and the emotional reverberations that generate the ‘multiplicity of expulsions, ensuring its [language's] infinite renewal’ (Kristeva, 1998: 134, my addition).

Indeed, T's mother died when she was a school-age child, but her death and its reverberations in her life remained untouched in our sessions for a long time. Often, when speaking about her mother, she would get confused, or forget, let go of what she was saying, as if she was not invested in her own words. Gradually unveiling bits and pieces of her life, I learnt that T was always a quiet child without many friendships.

She spent most of her time, after her mother's death, with her father, who used to speak for her, and often, instead of her. As an adult, she had some romantic relationships, with both men and women, none of which became meaningful to her. She moved between jobs, never sure about what she wanted, never able to speak about the reasons for her choices in life, or their meanings. In our encounters, she used to try and answer my questions, but it always felt as though nothing was said and I could not touch the experiences or access the meanings of her words. Many times, after our sessions, I could not recall what we were talking about and was left wondering about the empty echo of her words in me. Why was it that I could not remember the content of what T was telling me during sessions?

Freud anchors unsettled speech in the unconscious truth behind it, explaining that an ambivalent content manifest itself as disturbed speech, in which ‘two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, have left their traces’ (Freud, 1939: 70). Listening more carefully to the rhythm of T's language, I could sometimes sense a conflicted struggle when stories came out in constipated bits: begging to say something, stopping in the middle of a sentence, or saying something and then regretting it, as if words were ossified between opposing forces – to be revealed and to be concealed. The ambivalence in her language prevented T's words from coming together to form a coherent narrative, and the dry tone in which they came out often left me feeling detached, sometimes even bored.

According to Dana Amir, when someone awakens our boredom, it frequently reflects their difficulty in giving meaning to their words. Instilled with meaning, the details of reality come to life, and thus boredom is often a symptom of an attack on the ability to afford experience with meaning (Amir, 2014). At the beginning, I found myself trying to infuse the dryness of T's stories with fluids and life. I was seeking to open up blurred and coded words with questions and to bring to life some of the material, offering my thoughts and possible interpretations. I was carefully listening to hear the musical rhythm within every monotonous tone, searching for the emotional narrative in every story, and for the conflicted meaning behind every stuck word. Yet, I felt that, despite all

that, T continued to spiral into the shell of meaningless utterance that at the same time imprisoned all my attempts to understand and to get closer.

The Hebrew word for meaning, mashmaut, is etymologically linked with discipline and obedience, mishma'at, bringing into mind the power that is entailed in the ability to provide meaning – to give an interpretation – a power structure that is always part of the analytic situation. Was I becoming like T's father, speaking her words for her? Impinging my own point of view on her story? Perhaps, just like in my dream, she was speaking to me in an unfamiliar language that, at least in the beginning, I did not make an effort to approach. Within the psychoanalytic quest – to seek the truth, to articulate, to give meaning, to understand – I forgot my knowledge of Russian, which, although I did not speak or comprehend, was my grandmother's tongue, and I knew something about it, something of it was familiar to me.

In the psychoanalytic legacy of seeking truth and meaning, translation seems to be a halt and a reminder that language springs from its own impossibility for it is precisely what cannot be said that demands words. With the parallel process in my own analysis, I was becoming increasingly aware that my attempts to interpret T's words were also a way to defend myself against the dryness of our encounters. It was when I could acknowledge my own struggles in translation that I was able to recognise and give room to that of T's; to witness the dull, uncomfortable sense of the inability to speak, and to suspend the attempts – both T's and mine – to cover them with words.

Boredom is often a litmus test to the absence of what Amir calls an ‘internal witness’ – the ‘psychic function of the witness’ which enables individuals to bear witness to themselves, ‘to create a frame of reference in which they may experience themselves as being coherently comprehended by others’ (Amir, 2012: 884). But at the same time, she clarifies, it is precisely the therapist's ability to witness their own negation of thought and the vanishing qualities of the encounter that also initiates the process of transformation. In sessions with T, I became aware of my difficulty to touch the life T was telling me about; to stay with, find meaning or

understand many of the things she was saying; to discover the echoes of her words in me.

Witnessing, particularly that of trauma, Patricia Ticineto Clough writes, must ‘go beyond or beneath meaning and simply witness unspeakable yet embodied wounds’ (Clough, 2009: 150). Privileging speaking in the construction of the subject, psychoanalysis often directs itself towards ‘production of a meaningful narration of traumatic symptoms’, overlooking ‘bodily life’ and ‘accompanying rhythms of affect’. She introduces Bruce Reis' concept of ‘enactive witnessing’, in which memory can be redefined not just in terms of narrating, understanding or symbolising experience but also as bodily and affective traces beyond ‘content’. Thus analytic practice of witnessing should aim ‘to accept the experience of the experience … without therapeutic ambition’ (Clough, 2009: 153).

Gradually learning to accept my own position in-between languages, I also became more tolerant and attentive to a realm beyond meaning and articulation, and began wondering about the unspoken dimension of my encounters with T. I found myself less preoccupied with exploration of the ‘content’ of her stories and increasingly tuned to the conflict in the way the words came out. Listening to her pre-linguistic movements, something else became apparent: different voices and body movements accompanying both her attempts to speak and her silences. In difficult sessions with T, I would sometimes echo the obstructed movement of words between us, its deadliness and the painful inability to speak. Rather than trying to understand the exact chronology of what she was telling me, I listened to the structure of her speech, to the struggles of our translations. After a while, T shared a dream that I felt was an opening into the conflicted language between us:

I witness a catastrophe, buildings are falling, collapsing and then we are in a care home. People around me are talking to each-other, trying to go about as if everything is ok but I know we are all dying, my arms and legs are falling off.

I was surprised at the fluency of T's telling of this dream as if a bridle has been lifted off her speech. The dream was the first of a series of other dreams that brought to the foreground a demand to keep on talking ‘trying to go about as if everything is ok’. It touched on the unspoken sense of dying, the pending ‘falling off’ of arms and legs, that symbolises perhaps a loss, or – to take it a step further – a ‘killing’ of the actual body that comes with words. As Žižek explains:

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence – by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present – but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence.

I began to have a sense of the extent of betrayal that language carries for T. Words between us – in any therapeutic encounter – are a promise that would always break, an attempt to get closer to the thing-in-itself, only to discover that we have actually killed it while producing the words to capture it. Bion writes about such betrayal as a fundamental aspect of any process of translation that can be accessed through the myth of the Tower of Babel. There is always a God, he explains, that ‘belongs to a moral system and appears to be hostile to [wo/]mankind in [her/]his search for knowledge’ (Bion, 1963: p. 65, my additions). Translation, even the translation of ourselves in psychoanalysis, will always encounter a sublime resistance to the process of speaking, to the attempts to construct emotions and experiences into their narrow verbal meaning. Bion gives an example of a patient who stutters every time he tries to speak about his experience. He writes:

The words that should have represented the meaning the man wanted to express were fragmented by the emotional forces to which he wished to give only verbal expression; the verbal

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formulation could not ‘contain’ his emotions, which broke through and dispersed it as enemy forces might break through the forces that strove to contain them.

T's dream was telling me something about the inherent alienation in language, and the unbearable death that comes with words. It presented me with a conflicted element of translation in its relation to psychoanalysis: a care home that continues to put its emphasis on articulation in language might be ignoring at times the ongoing catastrophe of a falling tower that is always a part of speaking. As her dream shows, the traumatic locus does not reside only in the catastrophe of collapsing-building-falling-of-limbs itself but in the gap between the ongoing destruction and the attempts to speak. Although speaking always sits on the horizon as a marker for healing, for T, language was only possible as a violent cover that concealed the unbearable echoes of destruction; preventing a dialectical process in which – as told by the myth of the Tower of Babel – deconstruction and creation are intertwined.

Speaking is always already an alienation in as much as it contains a chasm from the thing-in-itself, but for T, the trauma of her mother's death brought in another aspect of this betrayal. As Kristeva articulates, every speech is first and foremost an act of mourning the losses inherent to the primary separation from the mother's body. She writes: ‘Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying’ (Kristeva, 1982: 41). Losing her mother as a child, T's resistance to speaking was also a way to preserve her mother, to avoid separating from her. If any speech is, in a way a confirmation of separating from the mother, for T this ratification was unbearable in a way that made all other speech unspeakable.

After the dream, T gradually began sharing fragments of the broken puzzle of her mother's death, in which, it emerged, the mother killed herself while T was in the other room. Her father found her sitting outside the locked bathroom door, waiting quietly, and for many months

after that, she refused to speak at all. T was in fact the only witness to her mother's death, perhaps for her, to her mother's betrayal. She did not have any memory of that period of time.

More than any other life experience, trauma is ambivalently positioned in relation to language, since, as Cathy Caruth explains, the trauma is not only the actual violent experience but the lack of any ability to fully know and understand it . The complexity of speaking about trauma stems from the fact that in order to keep living in the world as a human being, some memories should never be understood. Any speech that would be a step towards integrating the traumatic memory is also a step in the direction of accepting understanding it and ‘forgetting’ it, and thus involves a profound betrayal of the incomprehensibility of the historical past.

But it was not just the traumatic events of that day that were missing for T, every speech since carried her refusal to testify as a melancholic need to hold on to her mother. As Dana Amir explains, traumatic events have the potential to destroy – or prevent the development of – the ‘inner witness’. They can damage the psychic function that enables the subject to ‘shift between first person and third person’ (Amir, 2012: 885); to be able to both experience life and narrate life – to testify and validate the subject's experience. T's traumatic past did not only stop her from remembering her mother's death but precluded her from any other witnessing as well. Its catastrophic resonance continued to prevent the experiences of her life to be carried into language, in a way that turned every speech into a refusal to testify, a conflicted impossibility.

Beginning the dream with ‘I witness’, something has shifted in our sessions. Gradually, suffering became present, at times with restlessness, other times with tears and often with silence. In my work with T, but also in other encounters, I began to think that perhaps the ‘truth’ does not lie in the elaboration of the untold story, in giving a detailed account of what had happened. It presents itself between us in its rawness with painful silences, confronting us with the unbearable betrayal that narrating this experience into words entails. T began to describe a sense of anxiety in the body – pain in her arms and legs or in the jaws that would often

become stiff and would make it difficult to think properly. She sometimes shared with me images of herself running out of the room. Other times she shared dreams of crippled animals in response to which I felt myself to be achingly present.

‘The opposite of a good dream’, Ogden explains, ‘is not a nightmare but a dream that cannot be dreamt’ (Ogden, 2003: 23). T and I were beginning to find a way for the initial budding of voicing something unspeakable precisely through an experience of its crippling impossibility. After a while of sitting together with-in long silences, I could sometimes feel the pressure to solve the conflict disappearing as my thoughts were starting to drift. By allowing this gap – space for the silences, uncomfortable void in our sessions – images began to grow in the empty space between us.

For Bion, the ‘no-thing’ is a vital function of psychic life. It can present, as Eigen explains, as pain, hunger or a gap that is required for meaning to evolve, an empty space in which images can begin to grow. Meaning itself is not a thing but a no-thing and eradication of its evolution can happen when no-thingness is denied – when ‘no-things’ are treated as objects or as nothingness, in a way that makes it impossible to modulate, learn and grow from experiences (Eigen, 1995). Articulation in language for T was for many years an attempt to disavow the gap between ‘no-thing’ and nothingness; to substitute the budding of thoughts with language; erasing, by using words, the abyss of the unthinkable. The space of silences that begun to grow in sessions between us made me realise that it is precisely allowing the absence of the thing that turns the violent nothingness into a Bionian ‘no-thing’ and opens the door for reverie.

Indeed, something has changed not only in my work with T but within my position in-between languages. With a deeper understanding of the boundaries of any translation and the limited reach of my words, my analytic position has shifted from the attempt to accurately understand and articulate experiences to an ongoing opening of the always unspoken. Having a Jungian training in the background, I found myself drawn to working with images and dreams in amplification, but this time as a way to take a step back from my own understandings; as a method that allows

a chain of multiple possibilities, which are always held at a distance from the interpreted material. In moving away from an aetiological view towards enhancing the multiplicity of meanings of an image, amplification brings into the room the mystery of the always unknown, as a tender space, a gap, for the continual evolution of meanings.

In the homelessness of my work between Hebrew and English, I felt the weight in my encounters shifting from the narratives that were told to the unspoken words between us, or more precisely, to the silences that carry an impossibility for translation. Powerfully confronted with the paradox of translation that both compels speech and inherently denies it, has reverted my analytic position from the search for words, the quest to closely listen and promote an accurate articulation of the patient's narrative into a painful position bearing the endless gap between us, witnessing the frustration of the always unspoken, and carrying the burden of what can never be told.

How can this unbreachable gap, that became apparent to me in both my analysis and in my clinical work, ever be translated? Perhaps the legend of the Four Rabbis is articulating something about the different paths in which the inaccessible can be carried into language: four Rabbis – the legend tells – visited the Seventh Heaven to behold the sacred Wheel of Ezekiel. Somewhere in the descent from Paradise to Earth, one Rabbi, having seen such splendour, lost her mind. The second Rabbi could only deal with the uncanniness of what he had experienced by denying it, telling himself that it was nothing but a dream. The third Rabbi became preoccupied with speaking about the details, structure and meaning of the wonder he had seen. He obsessively talked, lectured and explained about it, but the experience of witnessing the miracle could not be captured. The fourth Rabbi, who was a poet, took a pen and paper and sat by the window writing songs about the evening dove, about her daughter sleeping in the cradle, and about the stars in the sky. And she lived her life better than ever before.

As the legend of the Four Rabbis shows, if words are to become alive and find meaning, the gap from the unspeakable should neither be negated nor attempted to be seized. Indeed, in Hebrew the word subject,

nosse, also means to carry – in order to become a speaking subject, this unbreachable gap inherent to language should not be attempted to be crossed too quickly but rather, must be carried. Perhaps through the dialectical trans-passing between my own ruins in translation, I learnt that what must be carried is not the ‘truth’ of what we can know of the past, the understanding of the analysand's story but rather the unknown, the unsettling questions within her untold words. My listening has shifted from the obligation to narrate the past into a witnessing committed to the open structure of the future, to the foreign echoes emerging at the rim of this unbreachable gap. As Walter Benjamin allegorises, ‘translation finds itself not in the centre of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one’ (in Jennings and Bullock, 1996: 261) Translation reveals that speaking is located at the border of an uncrossable distance; at the edge of the forest of the unknown. It must recognise its own boundary yet remain faithful that there is still something that can pass through, even if it is just a faint echo of our voices.